Courthouse Gallery Fine Art presents ‘New Work’

Ellsworth Courthouse Gallery Fine Art presents “New Work” by four realistic landscape painters: Janice Anthony, Judy Belasco, Gregory Dunham and Kate Emlen.

The show runs Sept. 11 to Oct. 18 and held an opening reception on Sept. 11.

Janice Anthony is a realist painter with a great affection for the otherness of the natural world, for places she recently entered, yet existed autonomously before her intrusion, and which continue to exist after her departure. Her paintings explore this mysterious relationship between humanity and wilderness — parallel worlds where the natural world is clearly a world apart and self-sufficient. Anthony wants to become these places, and for her, painting is the vehicle. Immersion in the natural world coalesces with paint and canvas — pulsating, breathing, ethereal and dense — a magical sphere where Anthony’s landscapes are created.

Anthony holds a BFA from Boston University, and she was awarded a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her paintings have been included in art books, publications, and in numerous solos shows in Maine and New York, and in national and international exhibitions, including “Masterworks from the International Guild of Realism.”

Judy Belasco paints coastal scenes most often of estuaries where the interplay of water, sky, and light are shaped by atmospheric weather. In the past five years, she has ventured into the hinterlands to camp and paint in Baxter State Park. Belasco is the daughter of Philadelphia artist Oliver Nuse, and the granddaughter of Roy Nuse, an impressionist painter and instructor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Belasco spent much of her childhood living in artists’ colonies in Germantown, Pennsylvania; Gloucester, Massachusetts; and Maine. She holds a BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art, and later studied landscape painting with noted Maine artist Linden Frederick, and fine digital print making with John Paul Caponigro at the Maine Photographic Workshop in Rockport. Belasco taught  art teacher at the Germantown Friends School, a position she held for thirty-two years. In 2008, she retired to focus on painting full-time. Belasco splits her time between Philadelphia and Stockton Springs.

Gregory Dunham is a Massachusetts native who moved to Castine in 1987. He has over 50 years of experience working in watercolor, oil, graphite drawing and lithography. His works hang in collections around the world, including: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University; The Tides Institute and Museum, Eastport; Boston Public Library Print Collection; Art Bank Program, U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C.; The Wilson Museum, Castine; MBNA Collection/Bank of America; Eastern Maine Medical Center; Lord Dunleath, Ballywalter in the County Down, Northern Ireland; Donald Sussman & Representative Chellie Pingree; and Sir Nigel Elton Sheinwald, the Former HM Ambassador to the United States of America, Washington, D.C., and London, England.

Dunham has won many awards, including the Rockport Art Association’s Silver Medal. He has participated in national group and juried exhibitions since 1972, and has shown in such places as The American Watercolor Society, The National Academy of Design, The Art Institute of Boston, University of New Hampshire, Butler Institute of American Art, Penobscot Marine Museum, The University of Maine’s Hutchinson Center, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. His professional affiliations have included: the Rockport Art Association, 1972–present; Guild of Boston Artists; and the New England Watercolor Society. In 2022, Dunham’s work was featured in an exhibition at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, and two of his watercolors will be included in the upcoming book The Art of Penobscot Bay by Carl and David Little.

Dunham was a founding member of two cooperative galleries in Massachusetts before moving to Maine, where he and his wife founded the McGrath Dunham Gallery, which operated for nineteen years and represented over fifty artists. In 2006, Dunham decided to close the gallery to focus on his art full time. Dunham has served on the board of governors at the Rockport Art Association, is a past president of the Rocky Neck Art Colony in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and was a founding member and co-chair of the Castine Arts Association. He is currently represented by Courthouse Gallery, Ellsworth, and Patricia Hutton Galleries, Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Kate Emlen paints both from observation and from memory, often starting a painting outdoors and completing it in the studio. She returns to her familiar, loved motifs so as to get them into her bones. Painting at the water’s edge from her summer studio in Maine and among the trees from her winter studio in Vermont, she is both keenly observant of and responsive to the natural world. The locations she paints are her own: through rhythm and color her places become yours.

“When I’m working, I’m not thinking,” she says. “The rhythms within take over. When I stand back from the painting I look for motion of composition, the play of space and counterspace, the weight of color and how all these elements influence one another. A painting is complete when I can feel it is moving and breathing as a whole. This is the wonderful mystery I look for in every painting: the mystery of natural rhythms taken into the rhythm of paint.”

Emlen has exhibited throughout New England. She attended MICA’s Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program in Brittany; the International School of Art Residency, Montecastello di Vibio, Umbria, Italy; and the Vermont Studio Center. She was a Visiting Lecturer in art at Dartmouth College, and has won numerous national and international awards for her poster design. Emlen is a self-taught painter, though she credits her graduate program in graphic design at Yale with teaching her to see.

Courthouse Gallery is at 6 Court St., Ellsworth. For gallery hours or more information, call 667-6611 or visit www.courthousegallery.com.